Jackson Moore

About

I am a musician living in New England.

I am interested in our drive to synthesize composite events in thought and externalize them through a sensory-motor interface, creating social bonds. My work seeks to intervene in the constraints that determine musical and verbal discourse. I intervene culturally by substituting frames with divergent assumptions into otherwise familiar settings. I intervene perceptually by designing formalisms that mirror our intuitive capacities, then surveying them for limit cases and thresholds where salience breaks down or finds exemplary footing. I intervene cognitively by creating roles for performers that carve out a space of unconsciousness, laying bare the inertia of our personal idiosyncrasies and biological faculties.

As a teenager I fell in love with the recorded history of jazz, and at the age of seventeen I moved to Hartford to study with Jackie McLean. Soon after, I discovered a community of intriguing autodidacts living in Middletown, Connecticut, an hour to the south. After two years I dropped out of jazz school and relocated there, hoping that together we could create new musical idioms.

I formed several ongoing groups with my Middletown friends that examined the ways musicians think and communicate with one another. I also began a long apprenticeship with Anthony Braxton which consisted of touring with his group, researching and developing his Ghost Trance music, and watching science fiction movies.

In 1999, I moved to New York City to see what kindred spirits I would find there. I continued my idiosyncratic pursuits in the cracks of the music industry, while teaching early childhood music in public schools and private music lessons to many unique individuals.

In 2003, my work took a fundamental turn when I shifted my focus from what the musician is thinking about to what the musician is not thinking about. I resumed practicing jazz, fascinated by the way a jazz solo articulates musical knowledge that the soloist is not yet conscious of. From 2005 to 2010, I organized the New Languages Festival, the first jazz festival to focus on my generation of musicians. Since then, New Languages has supported people and projects that invent new frames and frameworks for live musical collaboration.

In 2010 I began to meet a generation of visual artists exploring social practice. I helped organize several experimental schools, in particular The Public School New York. From 2010 to 2013, I worked at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. In 2015 I joined the staff at Bennington College, where I teach coding and run the Digital Arts Studio.

Projects

A musical pidgin language. A tiny lexicon that ranges over the phonological space produced by four elementary melodic distinctions: long or short, high or low, near or far, and continuous or separate. At the same time, Moss abandons pitch, pacing, inflection, and other aspects of melody to free variation, where they're magnetized by the desire of the speaker.

Songs designed for the soloist. They lift the foreclosure on tempi—no matter what speed the soloist plays at, the meter provides a frame of interpretation: a sense for whether each note is an upbeat or a downbeat relative to any other note, or a sense for whether a phrase is an antecedent or a consequent relative to any other phrase. However, because the songforms are antisymmetrical at every time-scale, the interpretation is always an unexpected one.

A chamber that projects auditory architecture around a listener. Using an omnidirectional array of speakers, it produces a sensation of auditory surfaces using ambisonic localization, psychoacoustic cues, and parametric mapping. Effectively, one finds oneself navigating by ear a world in which every surface is covered in sound-emitting pores. The Spacepod functions as a sort of spacecraft that sends the listener flying through auditory spaces that would be impossible or prohibitive to construct physically, without any of the constraints of bodily mass.

Life is a series of agent-based large ensemble pieces for creative improvisers. The performers move and interact independently within a performance terrain using a set of simple rules. These rules precipitate a complex global behavior: much like a cellular slime mold, the ensemble becomes a sort of macro-organism that exhibits its own emergent agency. As the interactions of the performers oscillate between a sparsely connected network and a well connected network, this organism begins to evolve anatomically. In the sparsely connected network state, propagation of musical stimuli are constrained to local subsystems, which then have an opportunity to stabilize into robust modules that persist during subsequent highly connected states. The structure of this anatomy can take vary unpredictably given different initial conditions, meaning that every performance leads to different and unexpected consequences.

Remote Hearing is a series of performances taking place around the world at predetermined times. The performers record themselves from wherever they happen to be, at an agreed upon moment in time, and only hear one another after the fact, when the recordings are synchronized and superimposed.